Today, the Internet continues to grow as a medium for delivering content. One of the factors driving the growth and success of the Internet as a medium for delivering content is the proliferation of high-speed Internet access to the home. This access provides a high quality data channel to the home of consumers, allowing for marketers and other individuals to provide quality commercial video and audio to the home user. Thus, the Internet offers a high quality and flexible medium for presenting content to the end user.
As the popularity of the Internet grows, more and more people rely on the Internet for getting their information and entertainment. High speed transfer of media rich content, such as video and audio, is readily available now over the Internet. One example is that some television networks, such as ABC, offer videos of earlier aired episodes of popular television shows. As such, the day after the airing of the television show, the website associated with the downloadable video is often heavily accessed by users wishing to download the video. The demand of multiple users requesting large data files places a burden on the content provider to come up with ways to deliver the content effectively and with a high quality of service. To this end, engineers have developed the content delivery network and service.
One example of a content delivery network and service is the network and service offered by the Akamai Company of Cambridge, Mass. Akamai provides a content delivery service that cost effectively delivers content across the Internet. To that end, Akamai established a content delivery network that comprises a set of servers, called edge servers, that are disposed at certain network locations on the Internet. These network locations correspond to geographic locations that have been determined by Akamai to be proximate to a large number of Internet users. Thus, the edge servers are placed at a location where they are physically close to a large number, if not the majority, of Internet users and as such they are described as being at the edge of the network, at the point right before Internet connects to the home user. Delivering content from these edge servers down to local users is thus understood as quick and relatively affordable. By contracting with Akamai, a content owner can store their content at these edge servers. When the home user requests content from the content provider, Akamai can deliver that content to the user from the closest edge server, by identifying the edge server that has the requested content and that is most proximate to that user.
In another example, a content delivery network places edge servers at efficient locations on the Internet and provides a load balancing function that could balance the load of multiple requests coming in bursts. The load balancing process would reallocate these requests to different edge servers across the content delivery network and thereby distribute the burden of delivering heavily requested content across multiple data processing platforms.
Thus, the content delivery networks act as large cache systems that strategically locate servers across the Internet and store content for delivery to an end user, while balancing the load of data requests from multiple users.
Although today's content delivery networks can work quite well and provide the content owner with tools for efficient and effective delivery of large data files, there is a need in the art to provide for more robust mechanisms for allowing content owners to ensure how their content files are delivered efficiently over the content delivery networks.